The wave of people will hit the Oregon Coast's string of 27 small communities linked by Highway 101, said Richard Benner, director of the state's land-use planning agency.

The Willamette Valley's rapidly growing population will spill west, perhaps doubling the size of many coastal communities in the next 20 years, Benner predicted Tuesday.
 

"It's going to put a tremendous stress on towns like Florence and Newport," Benner said. "Even little towns like Yachats."

More than half the U.S. population lives in the coastal zone on less than 20 percent of the land mass, and the population of that area is expected to increase by 27 million in the next 15 years, the panelists said.

The cities will have to accommodate the growth by allowing more housing density and using resources more efficiently to avoid sprawl that will gobble up farmland and forests, the experts said. That means more townhouses and apartments, not one-acre lots in suburbia, they said. 

"You just have got to be a hard nut and push toward better utilization  of existing urban land," said panelist Michael Harcourt, former premier of British Columbia who is doing sustainable development research at the University of British Columbia.

Such an approach may be a hard sell. Even people who recycle their garbage and buy "green" products may not want to give up their home in the suburbs, said Susan Heikkala, director of development for a California properties company.

Benner said urban sprawl has been a fact of life in Oregon's coastal communities for so long that it may be difficult to stop. The development has followed the narrow corridor between the ocean and the Coast Range - and the desire of most merchants to be on Highway 101.   "We don't have a very good answer to that unique situation," he said."I admit that."

But he offered some ideas:

A get-tough attitude by the state on granting direct access toHighway 101 commercial property.

Encouraging developments off the highway to provide alternate routes so residents don't have to use Highway 101 to get from one part of town to the other.

Eventually charging tolls to help finance bypass routes around the most congested communities.

Even before the state required urban growth boundaries in the early 1970s to contain growth around its cities, some parts of the coast already were divided into small lot subdivisions on private water and sewer systems. Those areas contribute to the linear development along Highway 101, Benner said, and he'd like to see them go away.  He's looking into the idea of a land conservancy group that could help buy up what he called "the scattered, ancient subdivisions" and redevelop them as large-lot home sites that wouldn't contribute to the strip development pattern. 

His agency also is considering "landscape" standards for developments in areas between communities. Benner helped develop such standards for the Columbia Gorge area when he was director of the Columbia Gorge Commission.  "Some millionaire builds a colonial-style house on a scenic headland," Benner said. "Is that what you want the Oregon Coast to look like? I don't think so."  Source:  Register Guard, by Larry Bacon, 7/12/00

The gray mammoth of an aging population is only one of  the changes bearing down on Oregon. In a state of shifting sands, eroding hillsides and dammed rivers, no landscape has changed more dramatically in the past 100 years than the human landscape. 

For the first half of the century, Oregon was a young person's state. Take a train ride in Oregon in 1900, and you'd have found an average of four people per square mile. German immigrants abounded, followed by Chinese, Scandinavians, English and Irish. Twenty percent of the state's population lived in Portland, where 100,000 people hunkered down between the West Hills and either side of the Willamette with fingers stretching toward settlements at St. Johns, Albina and Sellwood. 

By 1940, that population jumped fourfold, spreading to Oregon City, toward Gresham and westward over the West Hills. World War II changed almost everything, bringing thousands of shipbuilders, young families and ex-GIs into the state and, eventually, the baby boom. The  war and its aftermath helped create patterns of home building, consumption and an auto nation that persist today. By 1980, registered vehicles in Oregon outnumbered people. 

Taking a train ride at the end of the 20th century, you'd find an average of 43 people per square mile in Oregon, most of them along the Interstate 5 corridor. The Portland metropolitan area sprawls to Clackamas, Columbia, Multnomah, Washington and Yamhill counties, and Clark County in Washington. Forty-five percent of the people in the state live there, more than 1.5 million on the Oregon side alone. As immigration grew to levels equal to the beginning of the century, one in five of the new immigrants is from the former Soviet Union, followed by Vietnam, Mexico, China and Korea. 

From the arrival of Russian Jews and Italians in the early 1900s to Ethiopians in the 1990s, immigration has and will continue to diversify Oregon. By the year 2020, the number of Latinos in Oregon is projected to reach 374,000, or more than twice the number today. The number of Asians also is likely to rise, to 69,000. But the state will remain more than 82 percent white. 

Many people fear the new immigrants are different. But based on how quickly people learn English, become citizens, buy homes and intermarry, the new Oregonians will look remarkably like the old Oregonians.  "On all those measures, Hispanics and Asians are not looking any different than immigrants at the turn of the century," says Barry Edmonston, director of the Center for Population Research and Census at Portland State University. 

One notable difference is that a growing number of foreign-born people moving to Oregon recently are highly educated executives and engineers who hold some of the best-paid jobs in the state. Edmonston predicts the global economy will bring more of the same, including transnationals who don't want to become American citizens but are in the country simply to work. 

Since 1900, Oregon has drawn people from other Western states, chiefly California and Washington. In the 1990s, migration from other states accounted for 70 percent of the state's spectacular growth. 

For many people, Oregon was an escape. The Oregon Trail always has been as much about leaving problems behind as it has been about finding Eden, said Gordon Dodds, a professor of history at Portland State University. From Europeans fleeing famines and pogroms, to Midwesterners escaping grim economies, to Californians dodging racial diversity and pink slips in the 1990s, the road to Oregon has been a road away from problems elsewhere. 

But historians and planners ask what happens to the Great Escape with the expected growth in traffic, tension between whites and nonwhites, the income gap between Oregon cities and its rural areas, and the sheer square miles of pavement. What happens when vistas are as  scarce as children and vacant lots in central Portland? Little in the state's past has prepared us.  "We have an interesting history but not a very useful one,"Dodds said. 

Metro Executive Mike Burton says that in the 1990s, Oregon's growth was so profound that people were dazzled. "We had capacity, we were giddy about the future. Everybody came and said Portland is doing the best planning job in the world." 

Today, though, he receives calls daily from residents complaining of the same problems they said they left California to get away from. He said Oregon must look at its capacity for continued growth, decide where development should best be located, and be aware of the social and economic trends will affect us in the future. Source:  1/1/00, The Oregonian, by Julie Sullivan.

Glendening, a Democrat who is a little  more than one-third of  the way through his last term as governor, is considered the  national leader in the smart growth movement, which advocates the  use of government money to preserve undeveloped land by steering  growth into urban areas. 

"This gives me a bully pulpit, a national opportunity to promote smart growth," he said in a recent interview. "It will  give me a chance to explain what Maryland has been doing. It will  give me a chance to find out what other governors are doing." 

As chairman, Glendening will be the chief spokesman for the  nation's governors for a year, testifying before Congress,  attending meetings and speaking to the national media. The position  will give Glendening a national platform to promote himself and his  ideas.   The association can play an influential role in setting national policy. 

Three years ago, Maryland lawmakers approved Glendening's  landmark "Smart Growth" plan.  Smart growth policy says no public money should be used to  promote development in areas not served by public water and sewer  systems, roads and schools. Counties must submit development plans  to the state; projects that fall outside those boundaries are  ineligible for state assistance. 

 In the name of smart growth, Glendening has nixed plans for  highways, including a long-sought connection to reduce traffic in  the Washington area. He has steered development back to city  centers.  He has also resolved along with the governors of  neighboring  states to curb urban sprawl around the Chesapeake Bay. 

To some degree, chairmen of the governors association  can mold  the role to suit their purposes. When Jimmy Carter was governor of  Georgia, he used the position to raise his profile and run for  president. Glendening will be elected to succeed Utah Gov. Michael Leavitt  on Tuesday during a meeting in State College, Pa.
 

Source:  ABCNews.com, 7/7/00, Associated Press